


Too Many War Wounds (Not Enough Wars)

by WinterSky101



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: Aftermath of Torture, Angst, Arthur (Inception)-centric, Blood and Injury, Canonical Character Death, Cross-Posted on FanFiction.Net, Gen, Hurt Arthur (Inception), Hurt/Comfort, Kidnapping, Mid-Canon, POV Arthur (Inception), Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Pre-Canon, Pre-Inception, Torture, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-15
Updated: 2020-10-15
Packaged: 2021-03-09 02:06:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,532
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27027046
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WinterSky101/pseuds/WinterSky101
Summary: Pain is in the mind. Unfortunately, so are dreams.
Relationships: Arthur & Dom Cobb & Mal Cobb
Comments: 7
Kudos: 28
Collections: InceptGen





	Too Many War Wounds (Not Enough Wars)

**Author's Note:**

> Title comes from "Irresistible" by Fall Out Boy.

When Arthur wakes up on a Japanese train - _really_ wakes up, not just half-waking like he did when a bullet to the head pushed him up a level in the dream - his leg aches. Consciously, he knows there's no reason why it should. The bullet that shattered his kneecap was just a dream. He's unharmed in real life. If he pulled up his pant leg, there wouldn't be a single sign of what happened, not even so much as a bruise.

But pain, as the projection of Mal so graciously reminded him, is in the mind, so the imagined bullet still hurt just like a real one would.

He leaves the train car before Saito wakes up, of course. Dom leaves first, and Arthur lets him; Dom hates trains for some reason, and Arthur doesn't push as to why. Instead, he gives Dom a few moments before stepping out. He enters a nearby empty compartment and shuts the door behind him.

He rolls his die, and rolls it again, and rolls it again. Honestly, he hardly even has to roll it at this point; he knows the die so well that he knows its weight in his hand, its texture against his fingers. No one else has ever touched it, so no one else could ever imitate it perfectly enough to fool him. Still, he rolls the die three times and relaxes a little more every time it comes up one. After the third roll, he tucks it away in his pocket. Three rolls is usually enough for him. The chance of an unweighted die rolling the same number three times in a row is less than half a percent, Arthur knows, and usually, that's a low enough probability that he doesn't bother lowering it any more.

He's not as frantic about his totem as Dom is. He doesn't know what Dom's totem is, has never seen it in all the years they've worked together, but it would be impossible to miss the way Dom always ducks away after waking up, every single time. Then again, Arthur has also never been caught in limbo, and he's never had wife who convinced herself so thoroughly that her reality was unreal that she threw herself from a building.

He still misses Mal, though. Paradoxically, he misses her more every time Dom's projection of her ruins something, because it's so different from the Mal he remembers. The Mal he remembers was lovely and kind. The Mal he remembers laughed and smiled and helped Arthur cultivate his French accent from hopelessly American into something that sounded almost native. The Mal he remembers was _good_.

The Mal he remembers would never have shot him in the knee. That's Dom's guilt and grief and pain, spreading that pain so everyone around him feels it too. Arthur's tried to talk to him about it, but it never works. He rubs his knee absently and wonders if he should try again.

He wonders for half a heartbeat if he should leave Dom behind, but he knows he won't.

* * *

Years and years ago, before Mal died, before the world self-destructed, Arthur was kidnapped. He'd just finished working an important job with Dom and Mal, and he was kidnapped by people who wanted to know the details. Arthur was, understandably, reluctant to share such things, and so his kidnappers moved from just asking to interrogating. And then, when interrogating failed, they stepped up to torturing.

But before they started that, they dragged him into a dream.

And he knew it was a dream, he _knew_ it, knew that it wasn't real, remembered yelling and fighting the second they pulled out a PASIV, could see the cracks in the unpolished dreamspace that their subpar architect had thrown up, but that didn't matter. Pain is in the mind. If you die in a dream, you wake up, but there was a lot that could be done before Arthur died.

Dom found him the same day he was taken, but not until he'd been in the dream for what felt like hours on the inside. Dom found him battered from a few punches but not much else, but in the dream, Arthur had a knife sticking out of his left shoulder, a knife that his torturers twisted and twisted and _twisted_ -

Dom pumped the kidnappers full of their own sedatives, disconnected Arthur from the PASIV, and brought him home. Arthur woke up screaming in the Cobbs' spare room, and it took both Mal and Dom to hold him down and keep him from hurting himself. When they finally left, he took out his totem and rolled the die over and over and over again, hands shaking, and watched it land on one every single time. The odds dipped so low as to be nearly infinitesimal, and yet Arthur kept rolling. One. One. One. One. One.

Someone knocked on the door, and Arthur shoved the die back in his pocket. "Come in," he called in a voice that should have been hoarser than it was. His screaming had happened after he went into the dream, though, and the pain in his throat was as imaginary as the pain in his shoulder.

Mal stepped into the spare room, holding a tray with a glass of water and a bowl of soup. "You should eat, _mon cher_ ," she told him, setting the tray down on the bedside table. "Or at least drink, if you're not ready to eat."

Arthur didn't feel quite ready to do either, but he picked up the glass of water and took a sip. His hands shook enough that he spilled a few drops on the bedsheets, but Mal didn't say a word about it, just handed him a napkin. Arthur set down the glass and blotted the water off the sheets.

"Is something wrong with your left arm?" Mal asked gently. "You haven't been using it."

Arthur looked down at his arm, only then realizing he hadn't moved it since he woke up. There was nothing wrong with it, not now, but in the dream…

It wasn't real, even if it still hurt a bit like it was.

"It's fine," Arthur said shortly. "It was just a dream."

Mal looked at him with sympathy in her eyes. "Do you want to talk?"

"Not yet."

Mal nodded, then rested a hand on his shoulder. It was his right shoulder, not his left, but Arthur still flinched a bit, and Mal pulled her hand away. "We're right outside if you need us," she promised, then she stepped out of the room.

Arthur put his hand in his pocket and wrapped his fingers around his totem, then he reached for the tray and began to eat.

* * *

Arthur had been hurt in dreams before. Hell, he'd been killed many times. But he'd never been tortured so methodically, and never by real people. Most of the times he'd been attacked in dreams, it had been by projections from the mark's subconscious. To be tortured by someone's conscious mind - by someone who knew what they were doing and seemed to _enjoy_ it - was entirely different.

In the dream, he'd received many injuries, but it was the knife to the shoulder that stuck with him. Perhaps because it was the worst, or perhaps because his torturers kept going back to it, or perhaps because that had been the one to scare him the most, because the tiny part of him that wasn't sure it was a dream kept whispering that this would cripple him forever. Whatever the reason, it was the feeling of that wound that he couldn't quite shake.

He only brought it with him in a dream once, the first dream he shared after his kidnapping. It was just with Dom and Mal, just an experiment with layered dreaming, but the second Arthur entered it, the wound opened up, sending him to his knees with pain. Dom knelt next to him on the pavement and did his best to keep him from spiraling, and Mal shot herself in the head so she could wake him up as gently as possible. When he woke in the Cobbs' living room, Mal was already next to him, and she pulled him into an embrace before he even had the chance to think about fighting it.

"You're alright," she whispered into his ear as he shook in her arms. "You're alright, _mon cher_. We've got you."

Dom brought him a glass of water and sat at his side while the whole story spilled out, all of the details he'd kept back before. Arthur choked back sobs until he couldn't, and Dom and Mal helped piece him back together when he was done falling apart.

He never brought the wound into a dream again, but sometimes, in or out of dreams, it _ached_.

* * *

Dom gets off the train in Kyoto, so Arthur waits a few more stops himself. Their plan is to meet up in Tokyo, but after that, they'll need to split up and hide. They failed, after all, and Cobol Engineering isn't the sort of company that'll take kindly to that. On the train, Arthur starts looking at flights to the United States. Dom won't be able to follow him there, but that's alright; they should probably be staying away from each other for a while anyway.

Arthur will still check in on the children, though, because he does love James and Phillipa, and a quick visit is probably worth whatever risk it brings with it. Dom will want him to pass on messages, most likely, and Mal would want him to make the children smile.

Arthur's hand drifts down to his leg again, where his knee still twinges with phantom pain every time he moves it. That'll go away, he knows. It always does. He's noticed that, the more traumatic the dream injury, the longer the phantom pain lasts. This is fairly middling on the trauma scale, and it only merits being that high up because the projection who shot him wore Mal's face. Dom's projection of Mal has shot him before, but that doesn't make it easier to deal with when it happens again.

He tries to remember the real Mal's smile and finds that the first image his mind throws up is one of Dom's projection smirking down at him before she shoots him and ruins a job, and for an instant, he thinks he hates Dom. He doesn't, he knows just as quickly, but Arthur does know that the smart thing would probably be to stop working with him. He won't. He's only had two people he really trusted, _fully_ trusted, in his whole life, and now that he's lost one of them, he'd be a fool to walk away from the other.

His shoulder twinges, and he reaches up absently to massage it. The massage won't actually do anything, of course, but it makes him feel like he's doing something about it, and sometimes, that's enough to help. He remembers Mal's long fingers pressing deep into his muscles, massaging away the stress of a job, and closes his eyes, leaning forward in the seat. He buries his face in his hands and ignores the ache in his shoulder. It's not real, after all.

He won't leave Dom behind, but maybe he'll wait a little while before doing another job with him.

* * *

"So, how do we get the mark to give us the information?" Dom asked, looking over the crew.

Arthur tugged at his suit jacket and flipped to a fresh page in his notebook. The suit wasn't quite properly fitted - he didn't have enough money for anything that expensive yet - but he'd found that people were more likely to overlook his youthful face if he were dressed like a professional. He'd also found that he liked suits, although he liked them better when they fit him properly. Mal had smiled at him when she first saw him in one. _"Very handsome,_ mon cher _,"_ she'd complimented, smoothing down his tie with a wink. _"I always thought you'd look good in a suit."_

Mal wasn't on the job this time, too pregnant with her and Dom's first child. Perhaps she could have managed anyway, but Dom was worried about her, and so Mal stepped away with good grace, knowing that the combination of her pregnancy and Dom's stress would most likely ruin the job. She'd told Arthur to take care of him, then told Dom to take care of Arthur. Honestly, Arthur wasn't sure which of them needed looking after more.

"Forge someone he trusts?" the architect, a big man named Jean, suggested in response to Dom's question.

Dom shook his head. "He's too paranoid. I don't know if he trusts anyone, and if he does, it's someone he knows closely enough that he'd probably catch a forge."

"We play into the paranoia, then," the chemist, a tiny woman named Marie, said. "He's got information that he knows people want. He's probably been expecting someone to try to get it out of him. We do exactly that."

"If he's expecting it, won't that make him less likely to give in?" Jean asked.

Dom shook his head. "Not if we do it right. If he's been expecting this, he's probably already imagined a worst case scenario. We let him sweat a little bit, and his imagination will do half the work for us. We've all studied the guy. He talks big, but he doesn't have the balls to back it up."

"So we kidnap him-" Marie began, and Arthur's pen clattered to the floor in a sound that seemed much too large for the small warehouse.

Dom's eyes snapped to Arthur in an instant. Jean and Marie's quickly followed. Arthur ducked down and grabbed his pen, forcing himself to take steady breaths. "Sorry," he apologized, sitting up and bending down over his notebook.

Marie gave him a look, then continued, "So, like I was saying, we kidnap him and threaten a bit of torture-"

The rest of her words were lost in the rush of blood in Arthur's ears. He tried to focus, tried not to spiral, but even though he'd known where Marie was going, hearing the words aloud made it so much worse. His breathing quickened, although he was thankfully still quiet enough that no one else noticed.

Or, at least, he didn't think anyone else had noticed until Dom cut over Marie with a harsh, "We're not kidnapping anyone, and we're definitely not threatening to torture anyone."

Marie blinked at him, clearly confused. "It's not like it's real. It's just a dream."

"It'll feel real enough to him in there," Dom retorted.

"We're not _actually_ going to torture him," Marie protested. "The guy will probably crack the second we lay even a bit of pressure. And if he doesn't, we can have one of us 'rescue' him, and he'll be grateful enough to answer any question we ask. It'll-"

"We're not kidnapping anyone," Dom said in a sharp voice. His tone brooked absolutely no argument.

Arthur swallowed and argued, "It's a good plan."

Dom's eyes shot to him, widening slightly. Jean and Marie both looked at him too, both visibly surprised. Arthur didn't often disagree with Dom, at least not in public like this. He knew Dom hadn't expected him to disagree here. He knew Dom was fighting with Marie on her plan for Arthur's sake.

But it would work, and Arthur wouldn't let Dom risk the job over him.

Dom raked a hand through his hair with a sigh. "Let's take a lunch break. We can talk about this more after we eat. Be back in an hour, everyone."

The lunch break was just an excuse for Dom and Arthur to talk privately, and everyone knew it. Neither Jean nor Marie said anything, though; they just left, shooting furtive glances behind them every once in a while. Dom didn't say a word until they were gone and had closed the door behind them, then he turned to Arthur.

"Mixing dreams and trauma is a bad idea."

"I can handle it," Arthur replied, fighting to keep any emotion from leaking into his voice.

"Look, Arthur, it's not a weakness if you don't want to threaten someone with the same hell you went through. And if you break-"

"I'm not going to break," Arthur replied sharply.

"If you break," Dom repeated, "it's going to drag the whole job sideways. I wouldn't let us do a plan any of us would be affected by like this. Jesus, it hasn't even been a year since everything that happened to you. I'm not putting you through this. We're not kidnapping anyone."

"It's the best plan anyone's put forth so far."

"It's the second plan anyone's suggested," Dom countered. "I'm sure you can come up with something better if you put some thought into it."

"And if I can't?" Arthur retorted. "Will you do Marie's plan?"

"If you can't, we'll reevaluate," Dom replied, which Arthur guessed was a no.

"Don't ruin the job over me," Arthur snapped.

"I'm not going to ruin anything," Dom replied. "We'll figure something out." He put a hand on Arthur's shoulder, his left shoulder, and it flared with imaginary pain that had Arthur twisting away from his grip in a heartbeat. Dom gave him a look, and Arthur turned away before he could fully read it, grabbing his bag.

"Where are you going?" Dom asked.

"Lunch," Arthur replied shortly, and he left the warehouse.

Dom, he knew, was probably right. Mixing trauma and dreaming was never a good idea, and as little as Arthur liked to think of himself as traumatized, his response to the idea of kidnapping their mark had definitely been a clear sign of trauma.

So, if he was going to be the reason they couldn't go with the best plan they had so far, he'd just have to make a better one. And he'd do that, once his heart stopped pounding.

 _God_ , he wished Mal were there. He didn't want to ever do a job without her again.

* * *

The job went off without a hitch and without a kidnapping. Dom and Arthur went home after it was finished - which happened to be the same place, since Arthur had been living with the Cobbs for the past year or so - and Arthur decided to dedicate himself to pampering Mal in her last few months of pregnancy. Dom did his best to take care of her as well, but Arthur was the one anticipating her every need as if he were the father of the child instead of Dom. Mal allowed it without a word in a way that made Arthur think Dom had definitely talked with her about the job and the way it had almost gone, but she didn't mention it, so neither did he.

"Will you be godfather?" Mal asked one afternoon, while she and Arthur were sitting together in the living room. Dom was out grocery shopping while Mal and Arthur were both clumsily attempting to teach themselves to knit. Arthur's attempt at a baby blanket was coming out better than Mal's, but not by much.

Arthur looked over at Mal. "You do remember that I'm Jewish, right? Isn't the godfather supposed to make sure the kid gets a good Christian upbringing?"

"You know Dom and I don't care about any of that," Mal dismissed. "We want you as godfather so that, if anything happens to us, our child will still have you."

"Your child will always have me," Arthur replied automatically. "But I'll be godfather if you want me to be."

"Good," Mal said, nodding once. "Dom and I wanted an official link between you and the child, just in case."

"Mal, nothing's going to happen to either of you," Arthur said, aware that his voice had grown tense. "You're both going to be fine, and you'll raise the kid yourselves, and I'll just be the fun Uncle Arthur who shows up sometimes to spoil them."

Mal laughed, immediately raising Arthur's spirits. "You'll be the fun uncle, then? I'm sure most of the dreamshare community wouldn't believe that."

"I can be fun," Arthur protested, although it was more in play than anything else. Mal was teasing him, he knew, and that was alright. It was certainly better than listening to her tell him what she wanted him to do if anything happened to her and Dom.

"I know, _mon cher_ ," Mal replied. "Now, let's get to work on this knitting, shall we? We've only got another month before the baby's due to be born, and we haven't gotten very far."

Arthur looked down at his knitting, where he'd definitely dropped a stitch somewhere. "I'll do my best," he replied, somewhat dubiously.

Mal patted his knee. "You always do, Arthur. It's why we love you."

* * *

In Tokyo, Arthur stays in the same hotel as Dom, although on a different floor. Nash hasn't shown up yet, according to the hotel's check-in system, which makes Arthur a little worried, but he still has time. It's early yet.

He doesn't go to Dom's room. It's not worth the risk, not until their ride gets here. Instead, he looks at more flights to the United States. He'll lay low for a month or so before he goes to visit Phillipa and James, where he'll stay for a few days - assuming, of course, that their grandmother doesn't object like she sometimes does - and then he'll go back to laying low, probably in a city where it's easy to disappear, like New York or Los Angeles. Whatever he does, he'll make sure there's absolutely no risk to Phillipa or James. He can deal with his own risks, but he's not dumping a single thing on the children. He's their godfather, after all, and that means taking care of them.

That was what Mal always wanted, after all. Mal wanted Arthur to be a part of the children's lives. Mal wanted to make sure Arthur always had them, and they always had Arthur. There are many things Arthur is willing to do - a good deal of them things he's not proud of - but he won't do anything that would have disappointed Mal.

He owes - _owed_ \- her too much for that.

* * *

Eventually, Arthur got used to pain in dreams. He wished there were a way to turn it off, but that would be far too simple, so of course there wasn't. Pain was in the mind, Mal always said, which was an oversimplification, but necessarily not an incorrect one.

Arthur didn't get kidnapped and tortured in a dream again, so at least that was something. On the other hand, he did get shot, beaten, literally torn apart, and basically anything else anyone could possibly think of. But after the worst jobs, Mal and Dom were always there, and they helped hold him together when he felt like falling apart.

He did accrue a few phantom pains that would bother him occasionally. Most of them didn't last long, with his shoulder being a notable exception. For the others, they tended to go away within the month, at most. He'd get shot in the leg and find himself limping the next day, or he'd get literally impaled through the torso by a lamppost - that was an _awful_ job - and spend the next few days moving a bit more cautiously than he technically had to. He wasn't the only one who got that way, he knew. He'd seen Dom and Mal do the same thing, and he'd witnessed it with others on jobs as well. If your brain thinks your body's been damaged, it can take a little while for it to realize that it's wrong.

Arthur also accrued a few real scars, although he got hurt in dreams far more often than he got hurt topside. Sometimes, when he caught sight of a scar, he thought about all the other places he should have had scars as well, all the places where he'd certainly hurt enough for one. Why is it that the bullet graze on his right upper arm left a scar when the knife to his left shoulder didn't? Of course, he knew why, but sometimes it seemed almost ridiculous to think about. He'd experienced the pain. He'd felt the knife in his shoulder, felt the blade scrape against bone, felt the blood slowly soak his shirtsleeve. How could he go through all of that and come out without so much as a mark?

Dreams, Arthur thought, were full of unimaginable cruelty, and he'd leave them behind if he didn't love them so damn much.

* * *

He did legitimately think about quitting when he got the news about Mal.

He didn't believe for an instant that Dom had had anything to do with it, of course. He'd seen how ridiculously in love those two had been - and oh, the past tense _hurt_ \- and he knew Dom would rather throw himself from a window than push Mal out of one.

Dom fled the murder investigation, but it only took Arthur a few hours to figure out where he went. He followed Dom to Paris, which was a stupidly typical place to go but likely to be overlooked for exactly that reason. Arthur wondered if Dom went to Paris because he was an idiot or because he was a genius.

When he saw Dom, slumped over a Parisian bar, he expected it was the former.

"Dom," he said quietly, sliding into the seat next to him. " _Dom_."

"I didn't do it," Dom slurred. "Didn't do it, Arthur, I _swear_ -"

"I know," Arthur said, the words weighing on him like cinderblocks as he helped Dom to his feet and dragged him to his hotel to dry out. While Dom was passed out on the bed, Arthur made plans and ignored the siren's song of the PASIV he knew was in the closet. Dreaming alone was a bad idea. He knew that.

He also knew that any Mal he saw in his dreams wouldn't be the real one, and it was the real one he wanted.

Dom woke up the next morning, and Arthur coaxed the whole story out of him, unspooling it slowly as Dom told him about Limbo, and waking up, and Mal's conviction that they hadn't. Arthur had hardly seen Dom and Mal recently, too busy working a job with a different extractor and then laying low after the job went a bit sideways, and while Mal had seemed a bit strange the last time they'd talked, he hadn't expected _this_. He hadn't thought-

"She thought it would wake her up," Dom said, his voice hollow. "She wanted me to go with her."

Arthur thought about it for a moment, unable to stop himself - Mal, standing in an open window, her hair flipping around her face, entreating Dom to take that final step forward with her - then ruthlessly shut down that train of thought. He would remember Mal as she lived, he swore to himself. He wouldn't let this knowledge change the way he thought of her. He'd leave her out of his dreams, because all things considered, he was fairly certain she wouldn't to be there.

As it turned out, Arthur didn't need to dream about Mal. Dom did it for him.

The first time Dom's projection of Mal showed up in a dream, it was on a test run. Dom was the dreamer, and Mal was just another one of the projections, not really focusing on them at all as she wandered the dreamscape. Her appearance was enough for Dom's face to go bone white, however, and when Arthur realized what he was looking at, he was sure he didn't look much better.

"Is that-"

"She's just a projection," Dom said, then he dreamed up a gun and shot himself out of the dream, leaving Arthur scrambling to do the same before the dream collapsed around him.

She _was_ just projection, of course, but it wasn't long before the projection started to interfere with their jobs more than just making Dom lose his concentration. She knew everything Dom did, of course, so she knew exactly what to do to ruin a job. She shot Arthur in the head more than once, and shot him other places too. She was more likely to appear in a second-level dream, and she tended to go after the dreamer, so since Arthur was normally the second-level dreamer, he was her target more often than not.

Not her _real_ target, though. Her real target was always Dom. She was always trying to make him suffer more than anything, trying to hurt him, and Arthur hated it, hated being a weapon used to hurt his best friend, hated knowing that his best friend's own subconscious was the one doing the actual hurting, hated that it wore the face of his other best friend as it did so.

Hated the way Dom started talking about the projection as if it were really Mal.

Dom knew it wasn't really her - Arthur really, _really_ hoped he knew that - but sometimes, the way he acted worried Arthur. He wouldn't shoot Mal, even if it was a choice between her and letting the job fall apart, even if it was a choice between her and Arthur. He wouldn't let Arthur shoot her either, although Arthur did it if Dom wasn't looking - and oh, that was another thing he hated, hated shooting a projection that looked like someone he loved - and he talked to her like she could be reasoned with, even though she had no reason. She was just a projection, just a bit of Dom's subconsciousness, just a personification of Dom's grief and guilt (and why did he feel _that_ much guilt, Arthur's mind asked slyly, before Arthur resolutely put the thought out of his head), and she wasn't _real_.

Arthur tried to talk to Dom about it a few times, but the conversations never got very far. The one time he tried to push it, the one time he needled Dom more than he probably should have, Dom ended up storming away and avoiding Arthur for the next two days, and when Arthur next ran into the projection of Mal, she buried a knife in his left shoulder and left him to dream up a gun and shoot himself out of the dream before the encroaching panic attack drowned him completely. Arthur finished that job, then went to the United States where Dom couldn't follow and hid away there for a while, talking to Dom the least he could without worrying him.

And then came the Cobol job, and Dom told Arthur the words he told him too many times - that this job was the that would get him home, that this would be the last one - and Arthur wasn't sure he believed him anymore, but he still had to try. He wouldn't leave Dom. Not now, not like this.

The Cobol job went off the rails pretty damn fast, but honestly, Arthur should have expected that.

* * *

When the time comes for Arthur to go find Dom, Nash still hasn't shown. Arthur's not quite sure what happened to him, but he can't let himself worry about it. Nash knew when they were supposed to meet up. He knew it would be every man for himself in getting there, and he knew they wouldn't wait if he didn't make it. The cold, calculating part of Arthur's brain adds that he wasn't much of an architect anyway, so it's not much of a loss. The biggest concern is that Nash would sell him and Dom out, but he doesn't know where they're going, so once they leave, they should be safe.

Until, of course, Dom picks the next crazy job for them to take.

Part of Arthur wants to cut his losses now. He still doesn't think Dom killed Mal, still agrees that he's innocent, but innocent or not, Dom is clearly unstable. He shouldn't be working jobs like this. He shouldn't be inviting other people into his subconsciousness, not when it's such a mess.

But Arthur knows he's not going to abandon Dom, no matter how much easier it would make things. He loves Dom. He loved Mal. Mal is lost - Arthur couldn't save her - but Dom is still here, and Dom can still be saved. As long as that's the case, Arthur knows he's not going anywhere.

He goes up to Dom's room and is outside the door just in time to catch the tail end of a conversation with the kids. He can hear the longing in Dom's voice, and it strikes him as so unfair that he's probably going to see the children within the month while Dom can't. Dom deserves more than this. The children deserve more than this. And that's why Arthur won't leave, because Dom deserves to see his children again, and if there's anything Arthur can do to help him with that, he'll do it.

He reaches up and rubs his shoulder, then he steps forward on a leg that no longer hurts (never really did) and knocks on the door.

**Author's Note:**

> My writing tumblr is [here](http://winterskywrites.tumblr.com/), if you're interested.


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